While it looks as though this salmon may soon be in the marketplace,  it is unclear whether the fish will be given special labeling indicative of its genetic makeup. While the public has not been in on the decision-making process during the approval  by the FDA, they will have an opportunity to evaluate the fish once it enters into the market place.  Although AquaBounty claims that these fish will help bring fish to market with fewer resources, it is not entirely clear in which way that works. A fish that gets larger, faster will require more food to get there, though the human effort in supplying that food will presumably be reduced, hence the savings.  But, will the genetically-altered salmon be as resistant to infection and parasitic disease compared to their normal genomic cousins? Only time will tell whether these changes are maladaptive when the entire panoply of generational  life’s experiences are taken into account. But the fact is that virtually all Atlantic salmon that we eat today come from commercial fish farms.

The FDA has already signed off on the idea that the animal has a stable genetic makeup  and that the fish are not harmed if you follow multiple generations. AquaBounty is expecting approval in the next few months to begin selling the eggs to fish farmers. What a super-voracious salmon will to do the environment is not clear.  AquaBounty has indicated that all of their fish will be grown in inland tanks, so that they cannot escape into the wild. This arrangement will be different from other commercial salmon fish farms that have their fish cages inserted into bays and inlets to take advantage of natural water conditions. Such arrangements have been criticized for the influence they have on normal migrating salmon and especially on the salmon fry that come back from fresh water hatching, heading for the sea. Such fry often get infested with parasites that flourish in the overcrowded fish farm cages as they pass through, often with a lethal outcome.

This is only the beginning of the brave new world of genetically modified commercial  farm animals. Look next for the “enviropig” which has been genetically modified to produce less phosphorus pollution in its manure.  The American public already seems to have accepted genetically modified plant food sources, while our European cousins remain skeptical.  It remains to be seen whether we will accept genetically modified meat sources; it appears that the AquaBounty salmon will be the first public test of the acceptability of such animals. Will they have less mercury? However, since it is possible that these fish will not be labeled to indicate their genetic status, we may never know from whence they came. That’s the way AquaBounty wants it and there are some indications that’s they way it will be.

RFM

Climatologists used to think that changes in the weather would only take place over hundreds if not thousands of years, because the atmosphere was perceived to be a large, gigantic carbon sink. But that has all changed and the contemporary view favors the potential for dramatic changes in climate that can take place  over decades or even in less time.  The delicate balance that we have taken for granted throughout the centuries of human history, has been significantly altered by our behavior, which has cumulatively started to change our environment, beginning with the industrial revolution. But those early, seemingly innocuous beginnings, are projected to reach peak levels of greenhouse gases during this century and eventually these new levels are projected to have a far more dramatic impact on our weather, even compared to the trends we have witnessed over the last few decades. Climatologists are confident that dramatic changes will begin to accelerate as the planet continues to warm and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.   One must keep in mind that if our planet Earth had no means of losing heat from the Sun, but only absorbing it, like a perfect black body, the Earth would eventually, perhaps over millions of years or longer, become as hot as the Sun. In contrast however the Earth without an atmosphere loses sufficient heat through infrared radiation that, if that were the only thermal factor operating, would leave our planet at temperatures well below freezing. It is the atmosphere that keeps absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation that is responsible for keeping our planet warm and, atmospheric carbon dioxide, though a small constituent of our atmosphere, has always played a major role in regulating our global climate.  Thus, the mean planetary temperature is created through the process of losing some heat through the atmosphere, while retaining some through heat capture and reflection; this dual process has served as the delicate balance by which we have faded into and out of warming and cooling cycles, including several ice-ages in our long geological history. While the causes of these past temperature fluctuations are still a matter of investigation and debate, scientists are in strong agreement that the carbon dioxide problem we face will dramatically change our weather, especially if we do nothing to control our carbon emissions.

The only way we can project our climate future is through computer models and base those models as rigorously as we can on data that we acquire through geological and other scientific disciplines. Today’s computer models are fairly sophisticated and have been gaining in precision and predictability as computer capabilities and measurement constraints have been slowly added to the modeling strategy. There is no other way. We are building these “General Circulation Models” and improving on them to make better predictions about our planetary future.  Initially, models and early studies tried to focus on why the Earth went through the dramatic temperature fluctuations that included several ice-age periods. Was this a normal cycling of the atmosphere and if so, why and how did our  weather change so drastically? But as the measurements and models got more sophisticated, climatologists, in collaboration with many other branches of science, including the biological and oceanic sciences, began to focus on a new problem, one that was increasingly created by man. This problem turned out to be not just an issue of greenhouse gases warming the Earth and the oceans, but also rising sea water levels that, in the near future, could threaten coastal cities and generate other, more dangerous possibilities created by alterations in the ocean currents that provide significant warm weather to Europe for example. In the latter case, models have demonstrated that that the Atlantic current that warms Europe, in which warm water travels north on the surface, as cold Arctic water travels in the opposite direction at deeper levels, could disappear in a relative heartbeat if the salinity of Arctic water goes down, as it might if significant melting in the region occurred. In an age of global warming, it seems counter-intuitive that Europe could get much colder, especially in the winter. But, not everyone is opposed to global climate change. Many Russians for example feel they would welcome a few degrees added to their winter. Then too excessive carbon dioxide can help support additional plant growth, but even this effect can turn negative if accompanied by excessive plant decay.

It was in 1938  that Stewart Callendar, standing in front of the Royal Meteorological Society in London,  first suggested that the planet was gradually warming and that the principal culprit was humans burning fossil fuels and adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Few other scientists accepted Callendar’s idea at the time, simply because it seemed irrational that the atmosphere was so delicate and limited that it couldn’t absorb the results of burning fossil fuels without a blip on the radar screen. Was planet Earth really that small? Earlier work by British scientist John Tyndall had determined that the main gases in the atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to infrared radiation, but “coal gas” was opaque to infrared rays, caused mostly by its high carbon dioxide content. In this way, atmospheric carbon dioxide became known as a “greenhouse gas.”

No teaching tool is quite like history for learning about the sea changes that shape politics and attitudes and the evolution of ideas, both scientific and otherwise. An excellent book that traces the history of global climate change is Spencer R. Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming“ Harvard Press, 2008. Weart has also created a site where a hypertext presentation and a summary of global climate change history and facts can be sorted out as a kind of short cut for reading the book.

From my perspective, the salient features of this story begin with the realization that scientists studying the global climate in the late 1970s had started to converge on the idea that Callendar was right: we faced a serious problem in the future with man-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which was carbon dioxide. But scientists alone cannot force changes in public policy and without some divine interference, scientists generally have a hard time getting attention to their concerns, unless there is a major catastrophe that requires their input for understanding (we can see the public beginning to turn to scientists for explanations as an aid in understanding the impact of the on-going BP Gulf oil spill).

In 1979, the influential National Academy of Sciences issued a report that gave increased visibility to the global warming concept by suggesting that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would bring an increase in global temperature of 1.5-4.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), an alarming increase that could raise serious concerns about the safety of our planetary future. Unfortunately, in the U.S., just as scientific studies of the global climate were gaining momentum, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a backlash and helped generate the Republican skepticism on global warming that is still with us (or them) today. About the time that Reagan was elected President, Greenland ice core studies revealed that drastic temperature changes had taken place in our history within the span of a century, suggesting that our climate is not an ultrastable, unmodifiable system at all, but may have a tendency to favor rapid shifts in average global temperature, depending on multiple kinds of feedback systems, not all of which were then identified (and still aren’t). Other alarming studies showed that carbon dioxide was not the only greenhouse gas we had to worry about, as methane and other trace gases might also make a significant contribution, and had to be included in the models to avoid their predictive failure. Antarctic ice cores also revealed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up and down together through past ice ages, which led scientists to conclude that our global atmosphere is highly dynamic and very modifiable–sort of like some  synapses in our brains.

1988 was an important year in the history of global climate study. It was an unusually hot year for the United States.  I remember that summer very well, as it was the year we moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis during heat spells that were uncharacteristic for the region and caused many well-established, older trees to die out. That was also the year in which U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was assembled, which, for the first time, formed a union between scientists and government representatives, whose function was to integrate scientific knowledge and help formulate public policy development to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC is the committee that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The first report of the IPCC was made in 1990, in which the committee concluded that the planet had been warming in the recent past and future warming seemed likely. By 1995, the second report issued by the IPCC warned that serious warming would be likely in the coming century. Given that it was organized under the auspices of the United Nations, it is axiomatic that the Republican Party would be opposed to any information coming out of that committee. Fortunately, Al Gore formed an important relationship with the committee and helped to amplify their concerns with his popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The hottest year on record, that of  1998, was associated with a “Super El Nino” which caused weather disasters and unrelenting heat. By the end of the 20th century, sophisticated computer models had been able to simulate global ice age climate changes and gain substantial credibility for their future climate projections. The third IPCC report in 2001 indicated that future global warming would bring the hottest period of the planet since the last ice age and may be attended with “severe surprises.” By then, the entire scientific community had agreed that greenhouse gases would likely be a serious problem and that the global reach of human societies needed to get busy to correct the excessive use of fossil fuels. A serious response was required of the major industrialized countries, but the U.S. has balked from entering into serious agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol.  This was followed by numerous observations on collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland that might cause sea levels to rise faster with far less predictably than previously thought. In many ways, it was beginning to look like we were facing a climate emergency.

The fourth IPCC report was issued in 2007 and argued that the cost of reducing emissions from fossil fuels would be offset by the benefits and savings of doing nothing to curb the further accumulation of greenhouse gases. In that year the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 382 ppm and the mean global temperature for a five year average was 14.5 degrees Centigrade (58 degrees Fahrenheit), the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Some have argued that we are in a relative cooling period since 1998 because of reduced sunspot activity, but it’s unclear whether such activity  unambiguously affects our climate: if it does, then we are in for a sudden increase in global heating when sunspot activity resumes.

Global Climate Parameters vs IPCC projections

The main problem with the IPCC reports is that they take the arguments and data from scientists and water them down, for more palatable public consumption, hoping the issue appears less alarmist by making the issue less stressful, which in turn makes the issue seem less significant. Some scientists who serve on the IPCC have published papers challenging the overly conservative nature of the IPCC reports; the political arm of the IPCC gets the last word on the tone of the warnings and the details of the projections. One such objection to the IPCC reports was published by Rahmstorf et al, in Science, 2007 (volume 316, p 709–available to the public without a subscription to Science). The graph on the left was taken from the Rahmstorf et al paper (published on line); in the top section, the monthly carbon dioxide data measured from Mauna Loa Hawaii (blue) is compared to the IPCC projection (dashed line; note that the yearly levels of carbon dioxide fluctuate because of the annual change in vegetation and hence carbon dioxide absorption, largely in the northern hemisphere). The middle portion shows annual global mean land and ocean surface temperatures combined from two different sources (red and blue) together with their trends. The bottom panel shows the most discrepancy in the sea-level measurements based on tide gauges (annual, red) and from satellite altimeter (blue) data. When compared to the dashed line and gray range representing IPCC projections, it is primarily the sea-levels that show the greatest discrepancies between measurements and projections. That in short is the main worry.

At the present time, most of the expansion of the oceans has been attributed to thermal expansion, since the ocean is warmer, with an added dash of mountain glacier melting. To date, melting ice from the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses have added little to sea-level changes, but that picture could change dramatically in the coming decades. It is the sea-level discrepancy between measurements and the more conservative IPCC projections that stimulated Rahmstorf et al to publish a brief note in Science that brought more attention and focus on the politics of global climate projections within a body that is supposedly dedicated to a more complete and objective analysis.

We are now at a point in our understanding of the threat to global climate change, imposed by burning fossil fuels, that more science is not required. Yes, we will continue to refine our models, but by being forewarned, we should be forearmed and, as a global society, we should be sufficiently knowledgeable to act with a little long-term planning, as if we are facing a global emergency. We must recognize that our small blue planet, its oceans AND ITS CLIMATE are linked inseparably at the hip and that all three are being degraded by human activities. Ocean levels will rise and threaten coastal cities. The decrease in ocean salinity and pH could wipe out coral reefs, change the food chain in ways we cannot possibly comprehend and alter ocean currents which can dramatically change our weather.  Water resources will become more scarce in some regions and more abundant in others. If one removes natural vegetation, it will have an impact on the regional weather. Remove the trees in a region and you will have less rain; remove the plants and expose the soil and you invite desertification in some areas through more moisture evaporation imposed by the elevated temperatures. Additional moisture in the air will bring more floods and storms, but not in all regions. Some regions of the world may simply become unlivable, especially those where the climate is already dry and hot.  The Southwest region of the United States faces additional constraints on water and annual rainfall and regions of Africa are likely to become increasingly dry and more inhospitable. The global society in which we live, now numbering about 6 billion people are far more than the planet can tolerate if each society aspires to be like the us, as we continue to go about our business with an unlimited appetite for fossil fuels and forest depletion.   If anything, the rate of ice melting from the polar ice caps has been underestimated and modelers are madly revising their computer simulations to account for more dramatic events, such as entire ice shelves dropping into the ocean. It is probably asking too much for a model to accurately tell us where and when giant fluctuations in ocean levels are likely to originate.

I think that Obama’s nation-wide address this past week was about right, despite its downplay in the press. We need to interpret the catastrophic Gulf oil spill to 1) recognize that giant oil companies are completely indifferent to the environment and are acting solely through a profit motive (no surprise here and let’s give Obama credit for establishing the $20 billion BP compensation fund and the elimination of the annual BP dividend to stockholders–this was using the bully pulpit with great aplomb and a sensible outcome) and 2) if we had started on a more conservative use of fossil fuels, with an objective of reducing levels of carbon dioxide emissions just ten years ago, when GW Bush came into office, at a time when the need felt more acute, we would not need the oil that is gushing out of a giant hole a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf.  So, if we start immediately on the same quest, the next ocean oil gusher, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic seas, will never occur, because that oil will not be required. Surely, with the Gulf oil spill, we are witnessing a source of oil that might be better left under the ocean floor. We should work towards the end of leaving some oil in the ground.

As Obama has pleaded with us to change our orientation about the use of fossil fuels, its an open question whether we will view this catastrophic Gulf oil spill to finally act and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There are several things we could do to give ourselves a dramatic boost in reducing our fossil fuel habit. Energy conservation and the development of fossil fuel alternatives is currently at a very primitive stage of development and needs dramatic new funding to alter its present course. One thing we must do is learn how to tax oil usage, eliminate subsidies to oil companies and come up with accurate accounts of what the true cost of oil is today, when you consider that a good part of our military is devoted to protecting our sources of oil, and in the process our military uses huge quantities of oil to run our ships and planes.  So, Mr. Obama, help us arrive at a figure for the cost of gasoline at the pump, computed by adding up the cost of subsidies, correction for the cheap bargain-basement oil leases, add the cost of military protection of the sea lanes and our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the then give us the future cost of gasoline, imposed by the expense of relocating major coastal cities to higher ground as a result of sea changes that are at present unknowable, but certainly on the way. Add to that the cost of this single Gulf oil spill and then try to calculate the financial impact it has had on the entire Gulf economy and the availability of Gulf seafood for the entire nation.  I don’t myself have this number at the moment, but it should not be difficult to estimate with ballpark numbers and would have been a powerful additive to Obama’s national speech on energy, especially if approached honestly and with full and complete disclosure.  We should all be concerned about this number and have a national discussion on what it means and how it should be used to motivate changes in our future.

The barn door has closed on avoiding global climate warming–it’s here today. But, there is still time to alter the slope or the rate of these changes and that should be a matter of concern for all of humanity, rich and poor,  but most critically, it should deeply concern the citizens of the United States of America, as we are the biggest offender and historically the most insensitive nation in facing what should be a moral imperative. If we do not act with intelligence and dedication to this task, we can be certain that the rest of the world will go along with our own indifference on the subject. Never before has a single issue of global significance rested so squarely on the shoulders of the worst offender in the history of humanity. We are not only in a position to act, but we need to change our habits and consumption of fossil fuel so that we discourage the rest of the world from trying to emulate our fossil fuel gluttony. The globe cannot afford to have China grow up to look just as modern and fuel-consuming as the United States, but that is just where we are headed. Beijing adds 1000 cars a day to an already heavily congested street and highway layout. In 2030, not so far away, China will need and use the equivalent of Europe’s entire energy consumption. They will achieve this by investing $3.7trillion in energy over the next twenty-five years. The Global energy supply has never looked as small as it does today. Should the condition of global “peak” oil confront us, as it has in several countries, including the United States, then expansion of the kind that China is planning will be virtually impossible.

RFM

Red Knot Shorebird

Perhaps we need another century or two to understand the species of the world and their inter-dependencies before we make judgments about who should go and who should stay: say goodbye to one and you may have to do the same for a seemingly diverse group of animals for reasons that are highly counter-intuitive. It’s foolish of course to even suggest that we are in a position to make decisions about species survival, because we aren’t knowingly making those judgments, even though events, such as species extinction, are very likely occurring on a regular basis as a result of human interventionism. But, species extinctions are taking place without our knowledge of the cause or even, in most cases, an understanding of the species involved. We keep track of big animals, like lions, tigers, elephants and other large mammals and, though  the future for them is not looking particularly bright, we are completely ignorant about animals a step or two below on the evolutionary ladder–like the now extinct, Gastric-Brooding Frog. Who said goodbye to that species? But, here’s one to ponder for the short-term: are you kidding me?–shorebirds and horseshoe crabs? This survival dynamic may play itself out over the next few years.

The interconnectedness of nature almost dictates that you don’t lose single species, that in in losing one, some other species or fauna will also be put into harm’s way:  the loss of one species may precipitate the loss of one or more others, largely because we are unaware of the biological forces that unite them. I don’t know who else we lost or which other species might have been changed when the Gastric-Brooding Frog disappeared, but it didn’t disappear without impacting other species. Of that we can be certain. But, what connection for example does the continued vitality of the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, an ancient marine arthropod, have with survival of the Red Knot bird, a migratory shore bird that makes an annual stopover in the region in which the horseshoe crab breeds? The Limulus is virtually unchanged since it first appeared in the Paleozoic, 570-248 million years ago. Though most people have barely heard of the Limulus, anyone who studies vision is well versed with this species, as its compound eye was first used by H.K. Hartline to reveal fundamental mechanisms of visual physiology, for which he went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1967 for his pioneering work. Horseshoe crabs are abundant on the shoreline of Woods Hole Massachusetts, where Hartline did much of his early work. One of Hartline’s students, Robert Barlow, went on to show that the male Limulus uses its eyes to search aggressively for females and looks for the outlines of the carapace as a visual cue for finding a suitable female, at a time when the animals come into the shoreline for laying and fertilizing their eggs, an activity that usually takes place at night. But, who would ever have thought that the seasonal breeding of this ancient marine species, which takes place big time in Delaware Bay on the East coast, would have a dramatic impact on the survival of the Red Knot bird, a migratory shorebird that flies 20,000 miles each year, from South America to the Arctic, where it breeds, and then flies back again. Surely the biologists got this one wrong!

The Red Knot arrives in Delaware Bay just at the time the Limulus has come near the shore for breeding and egg laying. Eggs are laid by the female in the sand and then fertilized externally by the male or males that surround her. It is the nourishment derived from feeding on the newly released Limulus eggs that provides a critically needed source of food for the Red Knot to regain its stamina and prepare for resuming its long journey North.  Once the Red Knots arrive at the Delaware shore, they only have about two weeks to get sufficient nourishment, rebuild their wing muscles and store fat for the flight ahead to their Arctic breeding grounds, where they lay their own eggs and raise their young over the short summer of the region. If  insufficient Limulus eggs are available, the Red Knot does not seem to have a plan B and may be ill-equipped to finish the long journey to the Arctic. In some regions where Red Knots used to breed in the Arctic, they have not been seen in recent years and insufficient Limulus egg nourishment has been regarded as the main deficiency in their failed migratory outcome. In preparation for the long flight from South America (Tierra del Fuego, in Chile/Argentina) the bird’s digestive system shuts down, such that the intermediate stop, to feed on Limulus eggs, provides the bird with a very digestible meal, rich in proteins–apparently the ideal food for building up muscle and fat for an animal with a reduced capacity digestive system. Despite the aggressive feeding of the Red Knot on Limulus eggs, the horseshoe crab population in the region was stable into the 1990s, when fishing with Limulus bait became popular.

The shortage of Limulus eggs seems to reflect an overly aggressive harvesting of animals, particularly gravid females used by fisherman as bait for catching eels and conch (marine snails): this has led to a significant decline in the number of Limulus eggs laid on the shoreline, down to perhaps 2/3 of previous estimates and the magnitude of this decline has been implicated in the reduced numbers of Red Knot birds making it to their Arctic breeding grounds. Indeed, it was the alarmingly fast reduction in the Red Knot population, by about 70%, that led to the discovery of their dependence on Limulus eggs in Delaware Bay.  The decline in Limulus breeding and egg-laying seems to be the tipping point that could wipe out the Red Knot and could do so very quickly if a better balance isn’t restored.   There is now a two-year moratorium on using Limulus for fishing bait in the region and researchers are busy trying to find artificial bait substitutes that could be used in place of the real thing. An excellent video about this species interdependency was shown recently on PBS and can be seen here.

How long this interconnectedness between a marine animal that is roughly 350 million years old and a bird, whose evolutionary record goes back 150 million years, is not a matter that can be resolved through the fossil record. At some point, the Red Knot’s migratory flight to Delaware Bay was initiated to be well-timed to the breeding season of the Limulus.  This synchrony could be seriously interrupted further by global climate change which might affect one or the other of these tightly timed mechanisms. Some biologists believe the Red Knot could be extinct within five years. At some point, you reach a bird density wherein birds can’t find one another to mate.

Limulus polyphemus

The fishing industry is not the only survival challenge that Limulus faces. The blood of  Limulus has been used for many years because of its unusual properties. Limulus blood is blue because it uses a copper protein as an oxygen carrier. But, of more importance is the fact that Limulus blood clots whenever it comes into contact with endotoxins. Extracts of Limulus blood have been used for decades to test for bacterial contamination. One quart of Limulus blood is valued at about $15,000. Currently, the FDA insists that all intravenously administered drugs should be exposed to a Limulus blood amebocyte lysate as a test for endotoxins. This is a significant improvement over the prior process of injecting a rabbit with the substance and then waiting to see if the animal gets sick and develops a fever!  The discovery of Limulus amebocyte lysate also took place at Woods Hole, through the observations of scientist Fred Bang. This insight and its technological development has reduced the endotoxin analysis test from days to about 45 minutes. Instead of killing the horseshoe crabs and then bleeding them, the pharmaceutical industry harvests blood from live animals, who are then returned to their native habitat. Thus, some former fisherman, who used them for bait, now collect them for blood letting in a laboratory environment and then release them to the same location. Last year, 300,000 horseshoe crabs were bled and then released; about 13% do not survive this blood-letting procedure, which extracts about 2/3 of their blood.

The counter-intuitive interconnectedness of the Red Knot and the horseshoe crab could only be revealed by extensive field studies that involved capturing, tagging and measuring birds along the pathway of their extensive, almost incomprehensible, migratory flight pattern. These are dedicated scientists who share a passion for this bird and its preservation. Why a bird would exist under the harsh conditions of the Tierra del Fuego, near the Strait of Magellan, then fly to the even harsher climate of the Arctic for breeding and the early rearing of their young, before flying off again on another 10,000 mile trip, is well beyond our capacity to comprehend. Perhaps it got started before tectonic plates rearranged the land masses. The migratory pattern of North America by non-indigenous Homo sapiens was primarily East to West, which is a little easier to understand. In contrast to the rational, the Red Knot flight plan is not one that any of us would recommend to serve as the basis for a committed, routine lifestyle, unless it was one we recommended to our Republican friends. I can imagine Rush Limbaugh feeding on Limulus eggs in search of a new high. Let us hope that the Red Knot survives and the current iteration of the Republican Party goes the way of the Dodo bird as its major flight plan glides it  into extinction. There are many signs that such a glide pattern is already underway. We will undoubtedly hear more about each species in the coming years.

RFM

While the Obama administration does not have the same  “drill baby  drill” attitude of its predecessor, there are no environmentalists within the administration, at least none with the passion of a Teddy Roosevelt or a Stewartl Udall; historically, it seems that spending time in the wondrous U.S. West was essential training experience to acquire a protective attitude about the environment–the physical wonders that your eyes report to you.  The “I want to save this for my children and grand children syndrome,” is a mind state which you could acquire while seeing for the first time places like the Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, Yosemite Park, Bryce Canyon, Yellowstone, or any of the other places that are included in our fabulous national park system. Those searing experiences, faced with our inherent tendency to exploit and destroy the natural environment or privatize it,  has historically served as the stimulus for environmentalism and site preservation. But, that was then and this is now. Today, whether it’s an oil spill or the threat of global climate change, we need a far more sophisticated and knowledgeable plan that can begin to sort out the   “species interconnectedness;” this will require more knowledge of biology and environmental preservation, an emphasis which does not resonate well with the short-term problem solving that seemingly exists in the culture of the Obama cabinet meetings and our need for more oil resources. But, the biology we need to be studying can no longer be seen with the naked eye, for it is microscopic in size, yet fundamentally huge in its impact–it’s the ecosystem of our oceans and the threats that exist from oil spills, over fishing and salinity changes that might impair the fundamental biodiversity of the water and impact on the bottom of the food chain where life support is critical and the point at which it all begins.

So, how do you gain knowledge of species interconnectedness by watching birds drenched in oil and being treated with detergents? You don’t! Unless we are watching the event in the company of environmental and marine biologists and toxicologists. Yet, even these experts have limited knowledge of what the long-term impact of an oil spill will do to all the species in the ecosystem. Like global climate change, it’s too incomprehensible to imagine and, unlike global climate change, we don’t have computer models to help us figure out the real dangers of an oil spill of this magnitude. The historical reaction applies here: we can only shrug our shoulders and assume that eventually, all will be back to normal, that the ocean can and will deal with this problem, fixing it in ways that we don’t yet understand. After all, there is an equilibrium to nature, even when faced with increasing global temperatures or a slippery oily interface. We may not like the new steady-state, and it may be far less compatible with our expectations from the oceans of the world, but a new equilibrium point will be established and so far, we have shown ourselves to be completely impotent to facilitate one outcome over another. Ocean ecology is perhaps evolving in something less than a geological time scale. Something short enough that we will be able to gauge some of the impact of the Gulf oil spill, but we will be unable to do anything about it. By the time we recognize what happened, and a validate that a new balance point has been established, we will not be able to return to the old one, no matter how much we miss it, or what we do to restore it. New counter forces will be in place to preserve the new point of equilibrium and oppose any efforts we make to restore an older point of balance.

Krill are tiny crustaceans found in all oceans. They feed on phytoplankton and serve as one of the essential elements at the bottom of the food chain. Somehow we expect that these essential organisms will be unaffected and that no large mammals will start washing up on shore because of starvation. Should that ever begin to happen, the human population would of course already be stressed, yet probably  knowledgeable about the unfavorable imbalances within our oceans and its implications for planetary balance. What do we really know about the influence of oil on the ecology of a region? Did we lose species in the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the one in Santa Barbara? In the case of the Exxon Valdez, the salmon and herring fishing industry in the region collapsed. Slowly the salmon came back, but the herring never returned. One mayor in the region committed suicide, apparently related to his despair over the oil spill and its impact on the local economy. Have we done enough studies to understand the changes in the ecosystem that invariably happen with a major oil spill? Each major spill is probably very unique, given the variance in species and habitat of the surrounding region and relative size of the ocean volume involved.  We know that for each spill, the lives of commercial fishermen will be permanently changed and their chances of getting a fair compensation for their lost livelihood is about zero, as it will take many years to resolve the impending issues and suits within our heavily biased court system, one that rewards and protects big business and allows lower income recipients of the calamity to serve as mere cannon fodder. According to some studies, significant oil residue remains in Prince Williams Sound where the Exxon Valdez spilled oil onto 1200 miles of beach, killing thousands of animals. In some areas, oil was three feet thick. Current estimates are that it will take decades more or even centuries more for the oil to fully dissipate from the region: Litigation against Exxon continues.

If you’re wondering about long-term damage liability, to compensate for lost jobs and continued clean up operations, here is what happened on that issue with Exxon (From Democracy Now): “In 1994, an Alaskan jury found Exxon responsible and ruled the company should pay $5 billion in punitive damages to some 33,000 plaintiffs. Exxon appealed. In 2006, the 9th US Circuit Court cut the award of punitive damages in half to $2.5 billion. Then, in a 5-to-3 ruling last June, the Supreme Court cut the amount of punitive damages again and ordered Exxon Mobil to pay just $500 million in punitive damages, one-tenth of the original jury’s ruling. That equates to about four days of Exxon Mobil’s net profits.” You can see how favorably the courts treat these jury-determined settlement costs. For Exxon, it’s just a few days of profits and they have more lawyers to throw at these issues than almost anyone else on the planet, unless it’s our own government that operates by bringing criminal charges.

This country is badly in need of re-implementing the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) and staffing the organization with field and marine biologists who can participate in efforts to understand oil spills and the devastation they generate on species and their interconnectedness. I have commented on this acute need in a previous posting. We only see the damage at the top, on the shores, in the form of dead and oily birds, turtles and a few mammals. We don’t have the capacity to see the impact on the ecosystem beneath or the effects of the new menace–the large subsurface oil plumes riding at mid-level depths in the ocean; the oil companies would like to keep it that way. For them too much knowledge is a bad thing. They would like us to remember that the oil platforms they put down become havens for fish to collect in the service of sport fisherman. Isn’t that a good enough benefit?

The lack of a strong, passionate environmental presence sitting at the Obama cabinet meetings has made it difficult for our urban president to find his voice on the Gulf oil spill. Someone needs to drive home the environmental disaster to Obama in such a way that an urbanite, who seems to have learned nothing about species interdependency and the potentially disastrous magnitude of the BP spill, can quickly get up to speed talking about phytoplankton, krill and other members of the Zooplankton group. He very badly needs to go out on a boat with a group of marine biologists and toxicologists, who can explain to him the dimensions of the problem and how seeing a bunch of oily birds, while visibly shocking, coupled to the regular summary of the spill on CNN (mostly consumed by showing the undersea footage of the oil leak bulging out if the drill rupture), is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg for the local fishing economy and the long-term health of the Gulf ecosystem. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a lawyer by training, doesn’t quite have the sophistication or experience to recruit the kind of scientific expertise and visibility required to assure the public that some level of scientific accumen is being applied to this disaster. In keeping with the corporate motif of the new world order, science and scientists don’t speak for BP, except through the corporate elites of the company, who know virtually nothing about biology; their objective is solely the public relations message and BP’s liability. Yet, biology is what this spill is all about and it is where the effort must be focused with education, research and a good dose of corporate honesty. School children in the region could be enlisted in the research effort to gather samples, make measurements, much like school children in Minnesota discovered and studied three-legged frogs. How refreshing it would be to see and hear the BP CEO tell us that BP has no idea what the long-term damage of this spill will do to the environment, but that they will begin to fund significant grants for the region to be studied as the long-term laboratory environment they helped to create.  At least that would be a starting point from which we could launch some serious research. Yet, we have to admit that the problem cannot be researched in the sense that no long-term projections can be made because we do not understand, nor do we have models for comprehending the impact we are witnessing from this spill. The new oil plumes beneath the surface represent a form of oil we have not encountered before and we don’t even know the cause. But, they potentially represent vast dead zones due to the lack of oxygen that has been reported near these sites.

Hurricane season is nearly underway and each day we experience continued oil gushing from the well, we run the risk of a single hurricane serving like an ocean Hobart machine, circulating and mixing the oil and water until it reaches the loop current and begins marching up the Atlantic coast. The city of Fort Lauderdale, a major oil import region, has begun discussions on the impact of Gulf oil that might find its way moving into the Atlantic coast, an event that could devastate the tourist economy of the region, to say nothing of the damage already done to the seafood industry that serves Florida and much of the country.

But, back to Alaska. If a spill should occur anything close to what we are seeing in the Gulf, once drilling in the Beaufort and and Chukchi seas begins, it will be impossible to devote anything significant to the cleanup operation, at least not for many months. Even Shell executives have agreed that “there is no good way to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice.” The government has acknowledged that a major spill in the Arctic waters of the area could have devastating consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to clean up. How about impossible? However, they concluded that a large oil leak was “too remote and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis. Well that was then (December, 2009) and this is now. The permit for drilling in the Arctic sea has been suspended, but that suspension could be lifted soon enough to see drilling this summer. Should a spill occur in these cold waters, the nearest Coast Guard facility is a 1,000 miles away, the nearest cleanup vessels and equipment are too few and at least 100 miles away, and the nearest airport where major supplies could be transported is Seattle, a few thousand miles away.

The Alaska waters where drilling permits have been issued, are vastly colder than the Gulf and any oil spill will take far longer to dissipate, no matter what the mechanism, be it biochemical breakdown or micelle formation and dispersal. For another, during the winter, weather patterns often include 65 mile per hour winds at temperatures in the -40 degree range, making rescue operations for any troubled rig virtually impossible. In the summer, the area serves as a huge breeding center for multiple species of birds that migrate from six different continents, including all of the other 49 states. Huge herds of caribou congregate on the Arctic coastal plane and Beluga whales have their calving season in these waters. To become more familiar with the region, check out Subhankar Banerjee‘s interview on TomDispatch.

Several years ago, GW Bush wanted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas development. Fortunately, environmental organizations defeated this idea. But that took place when every environmental organization, everyone interested in sane ecological management, knew they had a hostile President to deal with and opposition to his leadership on almost every front was widespread and passionate. Today, in the current climate, with a Democratic President, the environmental movement has been much more subdued and has become more passive about the ocean drilling plans of Shell Oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, particularly since Obama announced permits for that drilling operation a few weeks before the BP Gulf oil spill. Perhaps the Gulf oil spill will serve to re-invigorate the environmental opposition to drilling and help the country move rapidly to a state of reduced oil dependency. It is not clear to anyone that the drilling demands of the international oil giants is really necessary. You might want to read Michael Klare on this important topic. So far however, Obama has shown himself to be just as much of an oil man as we had with GW Bush. The Minerals Management Service, the government oversight function for the oil companies has for years been deeply corrupted. The recent shake-up in the government oversight structure may improve this relationship, but Obama has a lot of repair work to do if these oil companies are ever going to conform to the needs of our society, rather than their own needs of high profits and reckless drilling practices, with little financial risk to their bottom line. Maybe this will be his wake-up call for the environment and Big Oil.

RFM

The New York Times also has a multimedia site that is worth checking out; among other sources of information,  it has a history of major oil spills beginning with the oil well leak in 1969 off the coast of Santa Barbara. In that instance, prisoners were used as a major source of labor for the cleanup which employed tons of straw. But, how desperate are we for oil such that some wells in the gulf have been granted permits to drill beginning at more than 9,000 feet below the surface? Is this oil-drilling chutzpa or are we pursuing true needs? Oil companies fear that if they don’t feed the never ending growth of the expanding  global thirst for oil, consumers will turn to alternative fuels and sources of energy, dropping the price of oil and making these more risky oil adventures less cost-effective. But is that really true? How desperate are we for oil and how scarce are the sources, if we are now drilling at such deep sites, without having a more foolproof method for handling accidents.  This is an issue, in which the biggest oil-consuming country on the planet, namely us, can have a huge impact on our economy, the environment and the need for ever increasing oil supplies by adopting more sensible restraints on oil usage: the new federal standards for improved fuel economy will help, but other measures are needed to meet the demands in front of us for global climate change. The Copenhagen agreement seems too little too late, even though it’s better than nothing.
So far bp has been reluctant to have scientists make more definitive calculations of the magnitude of the oil spill, because this measurement will have a direct impact on the financial liability of the company.  A government report on the spill magnitude, compiled by several different agencies,  is due out this week. In the meantime bp is sticking to 5,000 barrels a day, but other estimates, based on seeing the films of the oil leak, go as high as 70,000 barrels/day. Bp refers to these higher estimates as alarmist!

RFM

In the aftermath of  WW II, Anglo Iranian Oil had assumed the dominant position in Iran’s oil production and had constructed a huge refinery at Abadan.  Ironically, the seeds of nationalism had been sewn by Americans, both by the speeches of FDR and the fact that Americans who were present in Iran at that time, were mostly doctors and aid people, such that America’s image at that moment, in the early 1950s,  was one of a prosperous, do-good country, unlike anything Iranians had come to expect, based on their experience with the British (British colonialism in Iran meant that they did not train Iranians on how to make things work, like their giant refinery in Abadan. So when the British were forced out of Iran when the company was first nationalized by Mossadegh, they were able to shut down the refinery, further alienating Iranians).  Another source of outrage by Iranians against Anglo Iranian Oil came in 1950, when the Arab American Oil company, operating in Saudi Arabia, had agreed, under threat of nationalization, to share the profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis. The British however, were adamantly against such an agreement with the Iranians.

To understand BP and its tortured history with Iran, you might want to read Steven Kinzer’s book All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, which tells the unfortunate history of Iran’s march to Democracy and how America, by supporting the demands of Anglo Iranian Oil (BP), betrayed democracy and sided with oil and profiteering, with a little anti-communist rhetoric thrown in to confuse the issue.  Kinzer was recently interviewed on Democracy Now where he summarizes this well-known history. Toppling Mossadegh in turn led to the Iranian hostage crisis under Carter, the election of Ronald Reagan (perhaps with the aid of the  “October Surprise”) and the theocratic dictatorship that exists in Iran today. Kinzer extends his analysis to include the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban and the American sponsorship of Iraq in their war against Iran (for whom we supplied intelligence and the helicopters that Saddam used to gas the Kurds). That single act of toppling Iran’s Democracy through a CIA coup, seems to pervasively wind its way through much of our history, including the events of 9/11.  New York Times writer James Risen also has a good piece available on this period in history, when the CIA turned to the dark side and permanently transformed what had been a good relationship between the democratically-elected Prime Minister (Mossadegh), the Iranian people and the American presence in Iran. The NYT also has a general website on the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government by the CIA serving British interests, where you can stroll through different sections of the unfortunate American participation. The American model developed in Iran, would serve for countless other, future CIA strategies to overthrow uncooperative or democratically elected governments, especially those in South America.

When Eisenhower was elected, we caste our lot with Anglo Iranian Oil and British interests. At the Times site, you can see the pictures of the players in this drama by scanning over the images to get their names. After the coup that deposed Mossadegh, we installed the Shah, whose torture and suppressive techniques administered through his SAVAK organization eventually led to the revolution in 1979 and the fractionated relationship we have with Iran today–a festering wound we refuse to allow to heal.

If we could go back and reverse one single step in the development of our policies in the Middle East, deposing Mossadegh and stamping out Democracy in Iran would get my vote as the one event we got completely wrong (not that we did very much right, as we continuously sided with oil interests against the rising tides of nationalism). We initiated the CIA coup that overthrew Mossadegh solely because Churchill requested it (by all accounts, Mossadegh was an exceptional leader, perhaps the best and brightest of the good men in the Middle East in those years–he was well-educated and committed to representative government; he was Man of the Year for Time Magazine in 1951 and hugely popular with the people of Iran; if he had a flaw, it was his inflexibility in dealing with BP) . Churchill was unable to get Truman to eliminate Mossadegh and preserve the interests of BP. However, once Eisenhower was elected, he agreed (largely because his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, wanted international companies to have unfettered access to the countries they operated in and he could always find communists even when there weren’t any); Dulles sent in the CIA, under the leadership of Kermit Roosevelt, who pulled the trigger and deposed Mossadegh. Today, we do not have a problem identifying our own nationalism: indeed, if anything, we seem to wallow in it, but we find it almost impossible to adequately recognize the nationalism of people  from other countries, particularly if we need something from that country. Somehow, we manage to convince the world that we are the only ones entitled to nationalism: everyone else’s nationalism has to get out of the way.  With us nationalism is  viral. Nevertheless, with the Shah installed in power after the coup against Mossadegh, Anglo Iranian Oil could not resume its previous position. There was too much national distrust of the oil company, which eventually changed its name to British Petroleum and initially had a 40% hold on the new oil consortium named the National Iranian Oil Company.

A question you’re all dying to ask is surely this: is the current Gulf oil spill somehow related to our meddling in the internal affairs of Iran in 1953? Preposterous? Maybe, but then again maybe not.  Was the toppling of Mossadegh, carried out through the CIA to protect the interests of BP, the non-verbal license for BP to acquire its swashbuckling attitude that allows the company to ignore safety issues and acquire a sense of swagger with confidence that brought them through the twentieth century into the twenty first and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they are now responsible for what could be the most environmentally destructive accident since the industrial revolution began? The most recent estimates suggest that the amount of oil being added to the Gulf is between 25,000 and 70,00 barrels or more a day, or roughly an Exxon-Valdez oil spill every few days. If we had allowed Mossadegh to nationalize Anglo Iranian Oil (BP), would we have a giant catastrophe spewing forth in the Gulf a mile beneath the surface of the water?  BP is the fourth largest corporation in the world and the largest in Britain. My own thinking is that if you can manipulate two powerful governments to do your bidding, as the British and Americans did to save BP from nationalization, then you, as a company are more likely to emerge from that experience with an unparalleled sense of corporate swagger that encourages disregard for the rules and laws passed by either of those governments, especially the two that you just outwitted. This might be one reason why BP is America’s largest oil supplier. If you’re a BP cowboy, after Mossadegh’s topple, you can keep your boots and spurs on as you walk down main street! The long threads of this interconnectedness seem too tempting to avoid sewing them into whole cloth, such that there is at least a tilt towards corporate arrogance. Or is it the fact that we just finished eight years of a presidency that encouraged and indeed insisted on oil company arrogance for now and into the future?  Maybe it’s not such a stretch to the imagination to see these connections and then wonder what kind of oil companies we are going to need if we ever get off of our dependence on black gold? It does not seem like BP is the model for the kind of oil company we need in the future. Indeed, it would have been so much better if we had allowed Mossadegh to stay and BP to go. After all nationalizing oil companies should help remove the two edged sword between cutting costs by reducing emphasis on safety standards and ruining the environment. The BP Gulf oil spill could be the tip of a new iceberg, as plans have been laid out to drill far deeper wells into the Gulf, as the technology for drilling advances, while the technology for protecting the environment doesn’t exist.

RFM

RFM

I have written about Rachel Carson previously, indeed on several different occasions, including here. You can read a nice summary of the impact of Rachel Carson on the chemical industry at the NRDC site. Or, you might be interested in the FAIR site that summarizes the many attacks from the Right that have been leveled against her book and her impact on DDT. There is even a website devoted to “Rachel Was Wrong.” Tom Delay, at the peak of his power, attacked Rachel Carson and “Silent Spring” for killing millions of innocent children–more than Hitler could have imagined. Some on the right are even denying that DDT ever caused a bird problem by making bird’s eggs too weak to support full gestation of the chick. The fact is that DDT does  cause health problems and other, more effectve approaches for treating malaria are available. The overuse of DDT has caused not only mosquito resistance to the drug, but cross resistance to other insecticides as well. The right-wing hysteria over DDT, describing it as a malaria “cure-all” promotes the idea that DDT is the only solution needed to solve the third-world malaria problem, when in fact the issue is far more complex. Yet the “DDT fixation” prevents other countries from contributing to the other methods, such as drugs like artemisinin-based combination therapy, or ACT, which kills the parasite and allows rapid recovery of the patient. What the Right hopes to achieve in their attacks on Rachel Carson is another silly bite out of the armor of the environmental movement. It was the elimination of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) that allowed Congressman to find their own expertise on matters of science and technology and the Republicans chose author Michael Crighton before he died and then George Will stepped in 0n global climate change and we are all richer because of these decisions.

RFM

As humans, there is much that we can celebrate about ourselves. While we don’t have the greatest body plans and we are not the fastest or the most agile or the strongest species, we do have a brain worth bragging about, a modern marvel, and perhaps the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. Although big brains per se may be worth noting, it is far more important to understand what part of our brains have evolved in such a way that we manage to dwarf the achievements of all other species with our rich linguistic skills, a powerful sense of logic, a prolonged period of social learning  and the creation of a vast culture that has led to a sea change in the earth around us.  Our  language facility  keeps our social evolution on a continuous staircase of change and adaptation, one in which each new generation adds its own cultural layer on top of those of its predecessors.The central question is whether we can continue on the staircase we are currently on or whether we need to backup and start over on a new trajectory. As far as I know, there is no evidence in the fossil record that suggests Homo sapiens was ever confronted with something as threatening as what we might face with global climate change and its potential impact on our culture. Are we smart enough to make the kind of adaptation that may be required to meet this new uncertain future?

Cortical surface of human, cat and rat brain (NEUROSCIENCE: EXPLORING THE BRAIN, Bear et al, Fig 7-27; not to scale)

The figure above illustrates the cortical surface of thee different mammalian brains, including human, cat and rat. These are not drawn to scale, but magnified as required to illustrate how different regions of each brain are functionally divided into visual, auditory, motor and somatic sensory partitions (the olfactory bulb in humans is  tucked under the frontal lobes of brain and can’t be seen using this view). Most of us understand that the cerebral cortex (neocortex), the outer, undulated surface  of our brains, is the real envy of the neighborhood. It’s what has our competitors swooning. This convoluted outer surface of our brain is so vast that it has to be folded into peaks  (gyri) and valleys (sulci) to squeeze  its huge surface area into  our skull; within the skull, the brain is suspended in a fluid-filled shock absorber system, surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and suspended by strands and layers of concentric, fibrous collagen, through which blood vessels penetrate to nourish and oxygenate the brain: an impressive engineering marvel with natural selection at the control center. You can appreciate that the cortex of the rat has very few folds, whereas the number and complexity of them increase as one moves from cat to human.

The three pound universe that resides in our skulls, constitutes  a small percentage of our body weight, but requires 25% of the oxygen we consume. Our brains do not store energy, so blood supplied glucose provides the main nutrient and must be continuously available.  Every region of the brain is within 90 µm of a capillary, reflecting this supreme dependency on continuous access to oxygen and nutritional support. Our brains have created a miraculous way of regulating their own blood supply: the blood flow within the brain is not uniform, but varies according to the tissue demands. Brain regions where neuronal activity is high receive more blood flow compared to brain areas which have lower levels of activity. So, blood traffic in the brain is under neighborhood regulation. It’s like the street gets wider if the traffic gets heavier.  It is the change in blood flow, based on neuronal activity (maybe glial cells too (see below)), that serves as the signal detection basis  for the technique of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI. The cellular  mechanisms which regulate this regional blood flow  are still poorly understood, but appear to involve glial cells, the non-neuronal cells that were once thought to merely be the “glue” that keeps the neurons together.

Our brains contain more than 6 billion nerve cells and perhaps a hundred times that number of glial cells. It is now clear that glial cells play many important roles in modulating neuronal excitability through a generalized set of tools we refer to as “glial-neuronal control.” Other than acknowledging that it exists, we still have a very poor grasp of the significance of this relatively new controlling pathway. We are far more familiar and conditioned to the idea that the neuron to neuron form of transmission is the sole basis of brain cell communication, primarily because we know that neurons communicate with one another through elegant, chemically mediated structures known as “synapses.” But we now know that glial cells can also communicate with one another: they do it through much slower mechanisms of “calcium waves” and connect with each other through electrical rather than chemical synapses based on structures called gap junctions. So, in all future considerations of brain function, we have to recognize the possibility that glial cells may be doing far more for our brain functions than we ever imagined.

There are two broad systems of nerve cell connections that contribute to the normal day to day operations of the brain. One of these systems consists of global extensions of nerve cells from regions within lower brain centers that innervate extensive areas of the cortex and other brain structures; these broad, diffuse connections provide for the global features of sleep, wakefullness and overall regulation of excitability or the “tone” of the nervous system. These systems are transmitter-specific and consist of overlapping connections of fine axons containing dopamine, serotonin acetylcholine and nor-epinephrine. The second brain system at the other end of the brain connectivity organization, consists of localized regions of nerve cells that work within a small region of the brain and constitute “local circuits.” These local circuits carry out the computational requirements needed to derive a small component of our sensory or motor functions and our behavior. In the visual system, local circuit neurons in different subdivisions of the occipital cortex (posterior in the brain) are used to derive information about the location of a stimulus, its color, its shape or its  movement pattern and direction of movement and, of supreme importance, whether the object we see is something we recognize: if so additional activity within the inferior temporal lobe of the brain is used to detect pattern and image recognition and that’s where visual identities are stored.  Each local circuit has an output, a means by which the computations carried out in one local circuit get transmitted to other regions of the brain; both nearby and more distant brain regions are served by these kinds of connections. In the case of the cerebral cortex, these connections are vast; one obvious set of connections is found in the corpus callosum, the giant collection  of nerve fibers (axons) that wire the two halves of the brain together and serve as the connectivity basis of many global brain functions. For most individuals language is stored in one half of the brain, usually on the left side and in the temporal lobe.  Here is one surprising fact about our brains: though our cortical functions are divided into different regions for vision, auditory, touch and motor functions, the microscopic structure of each cortical region does not reveal special cell types. The so-called pyramidal cells for vision look like the pyramidal cells for auditory signaling. So, it is the region of the brain and not the cell type that determines its function. Deaf people that learn to use sign language for communicating, use their temporal auditory cortex for processing this information, not their visual cortex.

There are many other kinds of fiber pathways that connect local circuits with both regional  and more distant areas of the cortex. We are still trying to understand how all of this novel pattern of connectivity results in a normal functioning brain, and, of equal importance, what happens to brain function if these connections are lost or not wired properly in the first place. In addition, not yet fully understood, is the functional basis for our state of consciousness or awareness of ourselves and our brain processes. Consciousness appears to represent a way of reading out the activity of the cortex and being aware of ourselves, our surrounds and our memories. But, how finely-tuned our state of consciousness is to local circuit operations, vs. more global “summaries” of activity remains one of the great problems for modern day neuroscience. Though we don’t yet understand its cellular origins, consciousness serves as the basis of our human character: it is the sum of all the parts.

Not everything we learn is available to our conscious awareness, which includes the fusion of long and short-term memory. Psychologists like to divide our memory into two forms–declarative–that which we can verbally articulate (where we were yesterday) and nondeclarative–the non-conscious commands we use to control our movements for example. When we walk, we are not aware of the alternate signals we send to our arms and legs that make our movements automatic–we simply give the command “walk” and the brain takes care of the rest with the details unknown to us. This too is adaptive genius, because it frees our brains to focus on the capacity to execute new global commands without worrying about the details of each command that is executed.  While the origin of these two forms of memory relate to what we can verbalize through our conscious recall,  the mechanisms that determine the demarcation line between declarative and nondeclarative memory remain one of the many mysteries of the human brain and its functional organization.

The cortex varies systematically in thickness from about 0.4 to 1.8 inches, depending on the region and the extent to which large input and output functions are part of its repertoire: it has a massive surface area of 233-465 square inches. If you removed the cortex and spread it out flat, it would cover about two newspaper pages.  It is the cerebral cortex, within which lies our capacity for language, rich vision, the planning and execution of movements, our ability to appreciate other senses like sound and touch and the capacity to integrate all of the sensory and motor information through special integration areas that also reside within the cortex, that sets us apart from all other animals. Integration of this vast amount of information is continuously updated through a millisecond to millisecond flow of information. It is this real time knowledge and our conscious awareness that provides us with the means to make rapid adjustments to changes in our environment and undoubtedly served our distant ancestors with a powerful set of survival tools when humanoids were prey rather than predator. Moreover, animals lacking a significant cortical structure typically have a far more redundant and limited capacity to vary their response to new challenges that appear in their environment–their escape reflexes are often more stereotyped and less flexible in their capacity to adjust to a new l challenge or threat to their survival.

Because our early mammalian ancestors survived by living under the feet of the dinosaurs, one can presume that natural selection participated in the development of the beginnings of a primitive form of a cerebral cortex that provided these early mammals with a new flexibility in the range of their escape possibilities and survival options through “escape diversity.” A cerebral cortex provided clear survival advantages at a time when speed and agility may not have been enough–when we might be confronted by a stronger, faster, more agile adversary (though no one knows for sure). The evolutinary pressures  of living with the dinosaurs produced in our distant mammalian ancestors the natural selection pressures that favored the development of a neocortex, becuause only mammalian species have them.

Another advantage available to smaller animals is that achieved from the skill of living in trees and using trees as an escape pathway. But moving quickly through tree branches with agility, reliability and confidence, places demands on the brains of those who achieve that selective niche and you can appreciate from your own experiences that no animal excels in moving through trees better than primates–the masters of agility in the tree environment: that agility was achieved by having a cortex that can process and react to the new environment as it appears in the personalized movie of the external world that  plays continuously in their brains, revealing the rapidly changing images sequencing in front of the escaping animal.  Excellent vision was one key, while exceptional motor skills were the other and the emerging cortex was the control center that made it all possible. The tree escape option places strict demands on one’s ability to move, since the mover will be continuously challenged by obstacles and branches and an ever changing visual scene that requires continuous shifting in the motor strategies needed for skillful movement and avoiding objects. But the integration of the information needed to make that adjustment could only be achieved by the cortex, for that is the center where sensory information and motor  planning come together so that strategic decisions can be made quickly and, with practice, seeming ease. And, there was no room for error. Falling from the tree was likely to prove fatal, either from the fall itself, the hobbling injury, or the new vulnerability to predators on the ground. The advantages of tree dwelling and the tree escape route was probably essential to our early ancestors, as most of our homini predecessors lived in trees. When Homo species came out of the trees, they were proficient hunters, meat eaters, tool makers and more fully prepared to deal with those who would predate on them, as they transformed their operations from prey to predator, using tools and strategies that would eventually lead them to dominate the world.

As we execute our daily lives, our complex visual mechanisms, through their cortical processing power, give us a continuous 3D movie in color, running in our brains at about 20 or so frames per second, which gives us our visual representation of the events that transpire before us, rich in color, speed and connected in such a way to evoke strong memories and stimulate our analytical powers. Perhaps half of the cells in our brains can be activated by visual information, making us a truly visual animal. During periods when we are awake, our cortex is alive with nerve activity. If our conscious state is related to cortical activity how is it possible to concentrate on a subset of the activity to meaningfully achieve something? All of us are aware of our capacity to quickly change our attention based on our motivations at the moment (reading a book, while shutting out all other potential distractions, like nearby conversations) or the sudden interruption of our visual environment by something demanding our attention. The ability to change our attention to one subset of our cortex over another is a powerful feature of cortical processing, without which we would be hopelessly engaged in a massive flow of information, perhaps paralyzed by neuronal activity overload.

I remember taking peyote once and lying on a couch listening to music and examining artistic paintings on the wall, getting pleasure out of all the sensory stimulation that was surging in my brain. While under the influence I thought to myself that the state I found myself in must be something similar to what it’s like to lose your ability to attend to only one region of your cortex, while excluding the ongoing activity of all other regions.  I was experiencing sensory overload because I couldn’t shut out one stimulus–sound–while concentrating on the other– the paintings on the wall. It seemed like the colors and sounds were too intense and inter-related for me to select one or the other to focus on. So, though we know little about the process, the gift of shifting our attention rapidly and selectively is a component of our consciousness and another gift of our genius cortex.

You can appreciate our dependence on vision by witnessing the severe challenges that blind people  go through to achieve the many things we take for granted or do almost automatically because we have our own vivid, personalized, lifetime movie that plays continously in our brain. Fortunately, our society has many compensatory assistance options for those suffering from visual loss, but it is self evident that a blind person living among our early hominoid ancestors, trying to survive on the African Savanna, would have been severely disadvantaged and challenged on a regular basis just to survive the array of predators that were around at that time. In that era, there were far more predators than one sees today.

Vision is the supreme sensory system we have and for good reason: by capturing light signals, we can detect objects in our environment at distances much further than those provided by any other sensory system, including sound. It’s the difference between signal detection from a source traveling at 186,000 miles/sec vs sound traveling at 1200 ft./sec. We are so advantaged by vision, that we actually process visual signals much more slowly than we process sound signals. Despite the slow nature of vision, it’s hard to deny the power of the  stunning movie we see in front of us our entire lives. Perhaps standing on two feet and becoming bipeds,  gave us an advantage for taking in a more panoramic view of the environment, or perhaps, as Darwin suggested, standing on two feet freed our hands to explore objects tactily and make tools more effectively. In any case, the great distance advantages provided by vision is one of the prominent reasons we have devoted so much of our brain to analyzing and responding to visual stimuli. Visual stimuli not only provide us with our conscious sense of vision, but they also regulate unconscious actions responsible for our eye movements and changes in pupil diameter that are used to fixate on new objects of interest and continuously compensate for the ambient light levels in the visual environment.  We enjoy going to the movies where we use our splendid parallel processing of visual information that instantaneously connects our visual signals with our emotions that in turn can evoked feelings of fear, anxiety, disgust, contempt and sorrow as well as all the other elements of our human psychological makeup. The giant screen in front of us provides large visual images with little contrast and strong interconnections to our visual memory, triggering the immensely gratifying experience we often get by going to the theater. We are compellingly attracted to movies in powerful ways still not fully understood.

It is the tapestry of cortical-derived options that have greatly increased our chances of survival and eventually secured our current state of planetary dominance. The evolution of the human brain probably had a lot to do with our early mammalian ancestors, who were running under the feet of the dinosaurs. In those very early mammals, survival skills were enhanced by the development of the early primitive cerebral cortex. Although the cortex is typically only a few mm in thickness, it was that outer shell within our brain that produced a new miracle–the miracle of knowing where you are and then deciding whether to leap, run or execute some other plan of escape: through the evolution of their primitive cortex, our distance mammalian ancestors could think before they made an escape decision. Through the cerebral cortex, the survival instincts of our early ancestors, or their escape behaviors, could be based, not on a simple reflex, like the predator-prey decision processes of the frog, but a reaction based on where they were when the decision had to be made. If they were on a cliff, in a tree or perched on a rock, successful escape behavior might have to be different for each environmental circumstance and could be not be mediated by a simple stereotypical set of reflexes. You had to think before you jumped!

The need to execute a different response for different circumstances served as one of the supreme survival tools of the animals with a primitive cortex: the cortex became the pinnacle of redundancy avoidance. And, once an escape plan was initiated, the power of the cortex provided the animal with the ability to modify the behavior based on the moment to moment updating of how it was going during its execution. This rapid modification was possible because the cortex provided these early mammals with a means by which knowledge of their circumstances could be rapidly and broadly integrated with all their sense organs, enabling a more “informed decision” to be made about the adaptive change required for the most efficient means of survival behavior. If, when moving through trees rapidly, by grabbing alternate branches with the right and left hands, and you suddenly detect that the branches are wet and slippery, you may decide to change your escape strategy by moving to lower branches that may be drier or get closer to the tree trunk and scale up to safety where the grip is more secure. These changes in direction and speed would not be possible without close linkage between the visual, motor,  memory,  and the sensory information needed to detect of wet branches. All of these signals come together in the cortex, where the command center for future movements is located. The ability to continuously update executed movements,  through on-going  cortical processing, like a massively parallel computer, with moment to moment revision of our state and place within the environment, provided the ultimate in adaptive behavioral variability that must have been part of our ancestors survival skill set. Thanks to our cortex, simple reflexes were replaced by strategies and plans based on knowledge and current circumstances. The modern mechanisms of learning and memory, with long-term memory residing in our cortex, meant that each new success we experienced could be adapted and incorporated into the evolving sophistication of our memory, as part of our iteratively adjusted engram. It was like switching from obligatory reflexes to a plan of execution based on knowledge of the threat and the circumstances we found ourselves in when we had to make the appropriate decision: early mammals started it and primates brought it into perfection.

When we consider the motor system that we use to execute and carry out our plans, it is not the cerebral cortex alone that is important for this aspect of our behavior. Our cerebellum, particularly the lateral hemispheres of the cerebellar cortex play an important role in the planning, early execution and modification of movements as well. This part of the brain is particularly clever at helping us make smooth movements and correcting those movements as new sensory information feeds into the cerebellar system. What is remarkable about the cerebellar cortex is that its output through specialized Purkinje cells is entirely inhibitory, so it’s importance is in reducing signals and refining planned movements rather than adding to them.  In addition, motor learning is a feature of the cerebellum that allows us to modify primary motor functions as our environment changes. We are not specifically aware of the actions of our cerebellum unless it is damaged or diseased, at which time we struggle to make smooth movements, as if the afflicted person is drunk, when in fact they are sober. Then too, the basal ganglia, which lie underneath the cortex are also important for smooth execution of movements, as well as their initiation. Anyone who has seen the motor limits of a person with Parkinson’s disease, a deficiency of dopaminergic neurons in the basal ganglia system, can appreciate that this region of the brain plays a role in regulating the normal smooth movements, particularly the initiation of these movements, associated with our voluntary motor behavior. Yet, it remains the singular task of the cerebral cortex to initiate the movements and make the decisions to alter them once they have begun.

Those of our ancestors that didn’t survive, might have lost the race, or the test of strength, but those that emerged from that era, did so with the beginnings of the greatest brains of evolutionary history. Our brains further evolved to give us the capacity for language, another cortical gift, which gave us a deeper culture and served as the birthplace of a common history and purpose. We don’t know when language first emerged in our evolutionary history because language acquisition does not leave a trace in the fossil record. But everyone appreciates that language-based culture helped generate ever more improved methods for survival, as the knowledge and history of our ancestors before us was transmitted in ways that served to our advantage: man could at last write a good survival manual.

A popular theory of man’s evolutionary history is that the rapid growth in his brain size, something he shares with other primates, reflects a disproportionate growth in the frontal lobes of his cerebral cortex, the specialized  region of the brain where man’s most longitudinal level of thinking and his projections for the future reside. I have commented on this topic previously in discussing hyenas and the Republican brain, which seems devoid of frontal lobe activity. Much of the neuronal machinery responsible for our personality and our capacity to think logically and strategically is embedded within the frontal lobes of our cerebral cortex. So, the sociological view of human brain evolution suggests that frontal lobe development facilitated man’s ability to form social networks, distribute the workload to create a social structure that not only initiated his cultural development, but also formed the basis of his hunting prowess with protection from hostile clans and the predators that plagued his distant cousins, such as Australophithecus afarensis. While the acquisition of language does not leave a trace in the fossil record, it seems likely that man’s capacity to form a culture must have been based on the development of language, with the progressive evolution of symbolism into concrete language forms that define many of the cultural differences seen today among the Homo sapiens subcultures. Language acquisition is a complex  evolutionary development that resides primarily in the temporal lobes of our brain, but also has important representation within our frontal lobes. The act of understanding language and expressing it through complex vocal commands requires integrative functions and collaborations with specific regions of the frontal cortex and the temporal lobes of our brains.

Although modern humans have been around for some 200,000 years, the acquisition of fire and tool-making had appeared in earlier iterations of our ancestors, though it has been argued that efficient hunting methods are a relatively recent development (~60,000 years ago). These cultural achievements, particularly group hunting, were probably essential for man’s development into an efficient predator against large scale animals. The higher levels of protein found in animal food sources meant that, with successful hunting and cooking methods, man could devote more time to cultural development, diversification of skills for survival and the implementation of social customs.  But, in the process of cultural development, man fused  his survival paranoia with the personality of his clan, such that the very earliest forms of complex societies included the art of making love and war. It seems to me however, that a high degree of variance exists within each culture about the importance of war and the degree to which war policies became more central to one culture over another. War as a reflex to new objects is not uniformly distributed among the population within a culture, particularly in modern cultures in which religion and cultural dominance are a strong component to the war-making mentality. The development of a paranoid state in early hominins is understandable. It was a successful defensive reaction, a sort of better be safe than sorry response. But, this long period of war-making and plundering other groups proved to be culturally threatening in the 20th century, when the tribal instincts of warfare got wedded to the modern mechanization of military hardware. I look at Hitler as a pagan warrior who probably wouldn’t be in history when conflicts were resolved with bow, arrow and sword. But with the ultimate weapons such as nuclear bombs and missils, anyone can be a catastrophe-maker. While we haven’t had a global conflict in nearly 65 years, we continue to kill Homo sapiens as if our older reflexive behavior dominated our thinking. The war option reflects an emotional component of our behavioral makeup that requires input from the amygdala and hypothalamus, the regions where survival insticts of rage can be called upon for assistance. How our analytical instincts, generated through frontal lobe analysis, get outvoted by the war-making rage instincts that probably require inputs from the amygdala and hypothalamus remains as one of the secrets to our survival success  in the distant past, but one of the obstacles for dealing rationally with our future.

All of the early means of survival, as hunters, gatherers, farmers or fisherman, relied on adaptations to the world that was not changed by our own adaptive behavior, at a time when the world seemed like an infinite collection of resources waiting for human exploitation. It was not until much later, after the industrial revolution, that our methods of mass hunting and fishing and general resource depletion of the earth, including the depletion of our forests, began to produce deficiencies in a vast number of natural resources, with the promise of future resources being vastly compromised if Homo sapiens continues on his present course. Just a hundred and fifty years into the industrial revolution we began to generate planetary deficiencies that man could not even begin to count, because he didn’t know enough about the planet he was destroying. That cultural deficiency seems to be getting worse as time goes on, rather than improving, stimulated by the irrational character of many updated and downgraded religions. Indeed, biologists argue that we are in a not-so-early phase of the sixth mass species extinction. The difference between this one and all of the others, is that this is the first man-made mass extinction.

In the latter half of the 20th century, we  slowly began to realize that the world was not a constant in the universe, a place of infinite resources, but was in fact a small planet, with finite resources, such  that we could easily appreciate the limits and the down-side to man’s adaptive superiority. All other species on the planet had to adapt to the planetary forces for their survival and these forces were immutable to the species struggling for their own personal continuity. But man’s adaptive genius began to change the planet over the past few hundred years, such that he now faces the ultimate challenge to his survival: how to survive on a planet in which human forces have changed it  in ways that he is only beginning to understand? Just meeting the fundamentals of life, those things that we once regarded as unchangeable, like clean water, clean air and a livable environment, will be the supreme challenge to man’s adaptability in this new 21st century.

Our early ancestors found value in forming clans, with work tasks distributed by sex, age and skill. Now the challenge is to determine if we have the capacity to form a clan of 9 billion people, or roughly the population of the earth projected as the steady-state population in the near future. Our modern culture has new demands for its survival, including energy costs to run our complex societies and support large economies, each with its own social order and environmental dependencies. Although our ancestors may have been responsible for creating some species extinctions, such as the woolly mammoth, who apparently had no innate fear of man and fell an easy victim to his hunting prowess, they largely adapted to the world they found and lacked the numbers and knowledge to change their environment significantly: earth was master and man had to find his own key for survival and reproductive competency. It was that way for several million years and for all Homo species, it was that way for the last 200,000 years.

As our culture evolved into and through the industrial revolution, with dramatic improvements in social wealth, communication, public health and industrial skills, we began a process that was entirely new for Homo sapiens, and eventually for the Earth. We began putting a new surface on the earth, one of cities and farms and expanded our collective civilization into one that increasingly changed the earth, and in many cases, the new makeover was made of materials with which Mother Earth was unfamiliar. We changed the chemistry of the Earth in ways that began to encroach on the essentials critical to our own survival, but we started these actions long before we understood their implications or their future impact. We cut down most of the trees (98% of the Pre-Columbian forests in North America have been cut down) long before we began to understand the importance of trees for our air and water resources.

In the relatively short geological life span of Homo sapiens, the very processes through which we had obtained our initial success, our planetary superiority, and the things we had taken for granted, like clean water, reliable food and safe, breathable air, began to erode as the new skin we put on the Earth’s surface got larger and larger, such that the products we produced and the very energy we used to sustain our culture, began to change our own atmosphere long before we were aware of it.  By the time the implications of all these changes became manifest in one way or another (the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire in 1969–that was for me personally a very early alarm–it represented something that was against nature, since burning rivers do not seem to be part of nature’s plan), it was too late to think of these issues as the subject of a rational analysis confronting humans, not unlike things our ancestors might have faced before, though surely on a smaller scale. But, these new findings are things we need to view as threatening to our own survival.

In America, the issue of global climate change and toxins in the environment and the man-made changes in the atmosphere became politicized. Politicization of these issues, meant the complete suspension of man’s sense of independent thinking, of his commitment to  a rational method of problem solving. The suspension of those biological facilities, the very basis of his evolutionary success, was a requirement for successful political party formation. The political system in America produced something brand new in the evolution of the human brain–a frontal lobotomy–created by the two party system of politics. What will win out? Will man restore his frontal lobe functions after years of denial, inactivity and the atrophy of disuse, or will he continue to descend into a resource depleted Earth that cannot support the life forms contained within it? This is the greatest and most serious choice that is now available to Homo sapiens. What will he do? Should we open up a new derivatives market and stock exchange to trade in man’s new vision and his new adaptive challenge? How would you invest in this market based on human and animal survival? What will be the meaning of private wealth during the 21st century?

So if man’s capacity to change the Earth now threatens the basic requirements for his own future, has the culture he produced become so runaway, so much on automatic pilot, that he has no chance of controlling the factors that are increasingly understood to be the result of his own environmental purges and exploitation? Did man reach the limits of his cortical apparatus to formulate a new escape plan, at the very time that he needs one now more than ever? Has he abandoned the use of his own frontal lobes at the very time when that is the only structure he has that is capable of seeing him successfully negotiate a new and better future for his species? Now more than ever, the threat to man is not so much the threat at hand, but it is based on the one around the corner–the one he can only imagine and can’t quite predict, though it is probably less than a hundred years away?

RFM

It is alarming to see that Europe is suffering from the same problem that we have here in the United States, since they have been better about regulating their chemical industry. Indeed representatives from Europe have appeared in this country giving lectures to major manufacturing establishments to tell them what chemicals they can and cannot use if they expect to export their products to Europe. And, they are all taking careful notes, because they can’t lobby their way into avoidance, like they do here. Fortunately for us, we are still enjoying benefits of a free market economy approach to the chemical industry–if it doesn’t smell too bad, go ahead and use it. I suppose what we need are large numbers of robotic bee colonies that only have to come back to their hives to get their little lithium batteries recharged.  Would a robotic bee project be a suitable challenge for the summer students at MIT? Or, should we take a stab at a biological approach? Where is the genome of the  honey bee when you need it most?

RFM